Arts and Letters

Charles Francis Adams, fourth in descent from President John Adams through President John Quincy Adams and a scarcely less famous sire of his own name, died in his eighty-first year, a young man to the end. He was soldier, financier, and historian, consumed by zeal in each of his successive vocations. Of our company he had been a member for ten years. Unanimously chosen as a representative historian, he was active in the enterprises of the Academy, making public appearances of dramatic power, and generous in his support of its undertakings. His personality was altogether sympathetic among us. The members of other bodies, personal friends of longer standing than most of us, have described him in their public tributes as brusque and positive, yet open-minded and receptive; as aristocrat by temper and democrat in conduct; as like an iconoclast and a conservative; in short, as the embodiment of paradox, physical and mental.

Doubtless, in one sphere of his activities and during the years of combat, he so appeared and so was. Much, too, depended on the temper of his associates, who all unconsciously may have presented a similar front to him. He was a doughty gladiator in the cause of righteousness, and had a heavy fist where dishonesty in affairs lurked behind fine phrases and shiny euphemisms. While in a high degree endowed with insight, while his vision of the goal was always clear, and while his reasoning processes made him in many instances prophetic, he was really a warrior; he loved the joy of battle even more than conquest. The weapons of his concrete knowledge and ruthless logic were not unfair and never foully wielded, but they were unsparing. With gallant, honest foes he was even chivalrous. It was not safe to menace him with precedent or the ethos of history or the lessons of experience. He was sure to have interpretations of his own which were alike novel and founded on unsuspected aspects of familiar facts. Authority was for him no thunderbolt, but rather a flickering, dancing will-o'-the-wisp.

This temper he manifested as an officer of the line in the Civil War, as a student and director of railways and systems of transportation, as an advocate of radical changes in the higher education given by American universities, and, what concerns us most as his colleagues of Institute and Academy, in his treatment of history as a human discipline.

Among us he was always suave and genial, as befitted a recognized personage. For many years of his later life his home was in Washington, and in the national society comprising men and women from all regions and of all ages he found a flattering recognition as a sage, which calmed his spirit and softened his manners. But in matters of history he was a knight-errant to the last. He regretted the discovery of America as having occurred a century too soon; he discredited the veracity of the enthroned divinities of history from Herodotus onward; the accepted view of Washington as a strategist of the first order he sedulously attacked. He was an advocate of states' rights and supported the project for a monument to Lee in the national capitol. His attitude as a historian was preeminently that of the doubter and the iconoclast. It has been said of Voltaire that he transformed the writing of history by the sheer force of doubt. In the present-day era of modern and radical reconstruction Mr. Adams made his many readers keen and alert, even if he could not always command conviction.

His complete works are embraced in eleven volumes. In a sense he was a writer of pamphlets and miscellanies, but from first to last there is a unity of style and purpose, whether the theme be ancient, modern, or contemporary, social, economic, or political. His style is rugged and polished by turns, but always a style—readable and reasoned. The contents are uneven in value, but everywhere you find something worth while. For him there was all around a turbulent, living, throbbing world, little concerned with academic standards of form and fashion, indifferent to culture, hard-fisted, and selfish. The morals of such a world were more gristle than bone, and needed hardening. And so he was a teacher of ethics, not of the chair and school, but of the lawgiver. He writes magisterially, he enforces judicially, and he flays like the judges in the gate.

That he wielded power as a historian is beyond all peradventure, but it was not because of his style. His title to a high place rests on his untiring industry as an investigator. For drudgery he had both capacity and respect, since without the ceaseless murmur of the treadmill no power can be generated. In biography he excelled; the lives of his father and of Richard Henry Dana are masterpieces of composition and vivid description. His lectures delivered at Oxford and published as the last volume of his series are a fine performance of daring, didactic controversy. While he had a certain British cast to his Americanism, he never forgot, and did not entirely forgive, the treatment to which his country was subjected by official and social England during the Civil War. It was bold, though not over-bold, within the threshold of their own house, to instruct, to warn, and to correct the descendants of the sires who had so wrought. The university, aware of his sincerity and impartial in its own judgments, bestowed on him its highest honor but one, the degree of doctor of letters.

The visit was particularly fruitful in that, like a mole, he burrowed among the tap-roots of historical knowledge, namely, the private papers put at his disposal by the families whose progenitors had made English and American history. Nothing daunted him, age had neither withered nor staled him, and the leads which he opened he and his highly prized friend, Mr. Worthington C. Ford, most industriously worked, bringing a wealth of rich ore to be assayed in America. He may be said to have retained undiminished energy to the end of his long and strenuous life. While his independence of character, his unflinching treatment of public questions, and his proud consciousness of inherited obligations forbade any close organic connection with party machinery, he was nevertheless a statesman, an elder counselor in politics. His advice, when sought, was freely given, and, when not sought, was proclaimed in such ways as to secure general attention from the intelligent public. Legislators were powerfully influenced by it.

He was therefore in some sense a maker of history as well as a writer of it. His nature was eminently social; he frequented private dinners and receptions and was always prominent; he talked abundantly and listened attentively. Again and again he declared that no platform was better than that of a great public banquet, and as an after-dinner speaker he made addresses which were always weighty with thought. His intimate friends were proud and happy in his society and confidences, for he was alike witty and humorous. Like the monk of medieval fable whose name was "Give," he found comrades entitled "It shall be given," and with all the gravity of his nature, the seriousness of his purpose, and the occasional frostiness of his address, he enjoyed life to the full as few have done. It is a pleasant duty to commemorate his work and his stimulus in this association.